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Positive Psychology: Signature Strengths and Work

Leading experts in the field of positive psychology contributed to this video about the practices and components of an arm of psychology that begins from the perspective of an individual’s strengths, not their deficits. Teachers can use all clips with students or as professional development in learning about the topic and students. Classroom activities are included for many of the clips. Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, George Vaillant.

This video clip shows how people incorporate their “signature strengths” into their work lives, making difficult or repetitive jobs less stressful, and how “flow” combined with signature strengths in the work arena makes for a more meaningful life. This resource highlights an auto mechanic who is “obsessed” with figuring out how to make a car run, a cashier, and an oncology nurse as well as an anecdote from a major company hiring cleaning help. Teachers can look for what students do on their own without direction…strengths.

The “quiz” excerpted in this article starts with a question that is good for teachers to ask…what do you most want for your children? And then follows with…what do schools teach? [All of us who teach should probably ask “what is the overlap in my classroom?”] The article then goes on to discuss teaching well-being in schools and some of the programs available. An interesting exercise for the classroom comes from the Strath Haven Positive Psychology Curriculum – called the “three good things exercise” they ask

…students to write down daily three good things that happened each day for a week. The three things can be small in importance (“I answered a really hard question right in language arts today”) or big (“The guy I’ve liked for months asked me out!!!”). Next to each positive event, they write about one of the following: “Why did this good thing happen?” “What does this mean to you?” “How can you have more of this good thing in the future?”

This TED talk from Martin Seligman gives an overview of the Positive Psychology field…and how applying research methods to “fuzzy” concepts is helping in treatment. The important take away for teachers is that they can look at students from a perspective of their strengths instead of the perspective of what their weaknesses are.

As a teacher, think of your students and how they individually lead “happy” lives…which are

The pleasant life: a life filled with positive emotion, a life filled with as many of the pleasures as possible. We can teach our students to be mindful of those moments and to savor them. An assignment Seligman suggests is to have your students design their perfect day…what would they do, what would they eat, who would share it, where would they be?

The good life: a life in which engagement in work, play and love makes time stand still. As a teacher, you probably have times during the day when you stop and say to yourself “where did the time go?” because you were so caught up in what you were doing that you forgot the clock or the fact that your feet hurt or that you would have to grade papers that night. You were living in the moment. The positive psychology term for that is “flow”. Seligman’s suggestion is that you have your students think about someone (still alive) who has changed their lives in a positive manner…and then write a 300 word testimonial to that person. The key here is to have them read it face-to-face to that person. Chances are that the person, in giving of him or herself, was experiencing flow.

The meaningful life: a life built around using personal strengths in service to a larger cause. Finding signature strengths (authentichappiness.org had free tests) and then using them to help others is the highest happiness. Just assigning students to community service is not the answer here – they need to be using those things that they are good at. It might be having a gamer help senior citizens figure out how to use the Internet, having a percussionist lead little kids in creating a song or having a student who loves plants helping in a community garden. Because it is an activity the student already is good at, he or she should experience flow…but in sharing it, it becomes meaningful.

This animated video (about five minutes) is a good resource for you to use with students…it gives a good overview and is entertaining to watch. A counselor might use it when talking about career decisions because it uses the five pillars of positive psychology – positive emotion, engagement, healthy relationships, meaning and accomplishment – and ties them to flow, mindfulness and learned optimism. Finally, it talks about Howard Gardner’s studies about “good work” in the business arena – work that is of high quality, socially responsible and meaningful. Helping students to learn of their talents and use them to guide career decisions is probably the best gift we can give them

Building on the concepts defined by PERMA (Positive Emotion, Relationships, Meaning or purpose, and Accomplishment) Seligman examines individuals who flourish, businesses which do good work and nations in which citizens flourish. In this video (about 25 minutes, so too long for the classroom) which was a presentation to business leaders, he talks at one point about teaching teachers the techniques of positive psychology that, when applied in the classroom, result in increased student happiness. Hel also takes it further by suggesting that nations could design public policy based on well-being of citizens, not merely on GDP.

Some of the information presented was based on the work of Felicia Huppert or the Well-Being Institute of Cambridge and we have pulled two of the highlight of her research here (from http://www.wellbeing.group.cam.ac.uk/who-we-are/founder/)

A trial undertaken with teachers in independent schools, on the effects of mindfulness meditation in teenagers. Weekly lessons were given in class and an MP3 file was provided for daily practice.

Felicia headed the consortium that has developed national indicators of well-being for Europe. This forms part of the European Social Survey (Round 3) which took place in 30 countries in 2006/2007. By evaluating subjective aspects of well-being the survey will supplement existing economic measures and provide an alternative way of assessing the effectiveness of government and social policy.